If you like DMV’s efficiency, wait till it runs state voting

Robert East finishes his voting at the California Army National Guard building in Long Beach in 2014. (File photo by Bill Alkofer, The Orange County Register/SCNG)

The California Department of Motor Vehicles admitted this month that motor-voter is an error-bearer.

The DMV said it sent the secretary of state’s office 23,000 erroneous voter registrations, including 1,600 for people who did not register to vote. DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said the agency is “committed to getting this right” and is working closely with the office of Secretary of State Alex Padilla to correct the mistakes.

According to the DMV, the errors were the result of technicians improperly merging registration information as they toggled between multiple screens. Some people were registered in the wrong political party, or with a vote-by-mail preference that they didn’t want, or in the wrong language. And then there were the 1,600 people who opted out of registering to vote and were registered anyway.

The errors were discovered on Aug. 5, and the DMV says it immediately stopped sending voter registration data to the secretary of state’s office.

This is a mess. Under the California New Motor Voter Act, also known as Assembly Bill 1461, every eligible person who completes any transaction at the DMV is automatically registered to vote, unless they opt out. So it’s possible that people who should have been registered to vote after Aug. 5 were not, in addition to the people who were registered but shouldn’t have been.

The automatic voter registration system went live on April 23, just six weeks before the statewide primary election. In May, Inyo County Registrar Kammi Foote said it was causing “a nightmare on the administrative process,” with confusion over touch-screen options on DMV devices causing some people to unintentionally re-register as No Party Preference, or producing multiple registrations from the same voter.

We’ll have to take the DMV’s word on how many voter registrations were mangled this way. An effort to require an agency audit was thwarted when Gov. Jerry Brown said the problem of long lines should be addressed by hiring more staff.

The department says it has hired an additional 468 employees and reactivated 112 retirees to help reduce wait times. Shiomoto told lawmakers the DMV is now providing “better, faster and more constituent services.”

But the problem of 23,000 erroneous voter registrations isn’t solved. “This is not the first time lawful California voters have been harmed and potentially disenfranchised by the state’s flawed election systems,” said Linda Paine, president of Election Integrity Project California.

And it’s not just the DMV that’s to blame. In 2012, California began a new system for online voter registration just one month before the deadline to register for the November election. EIPCa found over 6,000 people with duplicate registrations and 113 who voted twice.

In 2016, the state certified its new VoteCal system, a statewide voter database, just two months before the November election. VoteCal was supposed to use the latest technology to prevent duplicate registrations, outdated addresses and deceased voters, but it didn’t do that. EIPCa says government reports showed that 11 California counties had more people registered to vote than there were eligible citizens.

And then there are the problems at the county level. In the November 2014 election, Los Angeles County failed to print all vote-by-mail designations on its Election Day rosters, creating a vulnerability to undetectable double-voting. And in the June 2018 election, more than 118,000 L.A. County voters were left off the rosters at polling places. The county says it was a software problem.

The Election Integrity Project California has joined with Judicial Watch in a lawsuit charging that the state and Los Angeles County have failed to maintain accurate and current voter registration records as required by federal law. That could lead to serious problems in 2020, when Senate Bill 450 authorizes counties to mail a ballot to every registered voter.

If you’d like to check the accuracy of your own voter registration, go to https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/. And if you’d like to hear more about the challenges we face in securing our elections, join me Sept. 17 at Valley VOTE, where the guest speaker will be EIPCa’s co-founder, Ruth Weiss. It starts at 6:30 p.m. at Galpin Ford, in the second-floor conference room, 15555 Roscoe Blvd., North Hills. Parking is free in the lots on the west side of Orion Ave.